Has anyone ever played Frederick Pohl’s Gateway or its sequel, Gateway 2: Homeworld? They were published by Legend Entertainment, the last big commercial publisher of IF games. In fact, as I understand, Gateway 2 was the last work of IF to be widely distributed in stores. The interaction was entirely through a parser, but the games also had excellent graphics, animation, and music – especially for their time, since they were published in 1991-1993 if I recall. I don’t know what I liked best about them – the great gameplay (with puzzles at just the right difficulty for me), the atmosphere (I found it immensely fun to explore Heecheetown and the various alien worlds of Gateway 1), the pacing (Gateway 2 has two great opening segments), the story (just enough to keep me passionately involved with the game, while not so much as to be unwieldy), or the multimedia elements (described above). But in any case, I barely ever hear people in the IF community talk about these games nowadays. Has anybody played them?
I haven’t played the first one but I’ve played Gateway 2: Homeworld and it’s definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. I think I got it as part of a “5 games for £10” deal a few years ago and it reminded me just why I liked text adventures back in their heyday. The sheer scope of it’s pretty mind-bogglingly. If it isn’t the biggest text adventure ever written, it must be close to it.
Definitely recommended if anyone can find a copy of it.
Yeah, both games are at Underdogs. That’s where I first found out about them. If you download them from there, it’s worth playing them with DosBox even if you have Windows, because then the music is more likely to play correctly. I was going to mention that before, but I didn’t want to start a copyright flame war.
I’ve had both of them sitting on my hard drive for awhile but haven’t gotten around to playing them yet. I always meant to finish reading the books first.